School of the Air in Australia Educates Students 496 Miles Away

When you visit the Outback in great Australia you realize that you must travel a long ways to get from point A to point B so what happens when you live hundreds of miles from a school? You enroll in the School of the Air based in Alice Springs. I visited Australia and found this concept amazing!

It is common sense that you can't fund a school when there are only fifteen or twenty school aged children within a large radius but at the same time, you can't expect the children to travel that far to school every day, especially young pre-school aged kids. The School of the Air is similar to the distant learning programs some schools in the United States use. The children receive their school work in the mail and return their completed assignments to their teacher as soon as they're finished. They also watch lessons on a video screen from an instructor who is presenting the lesson live from one of the schools.

While at home the child's parents usually act as a tutor and ensure that the assignments are completed, sometimes a hired tutor will do this job. Although the students are given an approximate time frame to have their work done, they are free to work at their own pace within reason. Typically the children spend three days a week doing educational group lessons and the other two school days are spent with extracurricular activities such as music and art.

This service costs the family $100/year per child and is extremely popular since people in the Outback tend to live extremely far apart. Some of the students are as far as 796 miles from the original school in Alice Springs. The first school started this system on June 8^th 1951, obviously without the computer component, and since then fifteen more schools have opened. The children who live close to these schools are free to come in and watch the lessons demonstrated in person instead of at home and complete their assignments there. Throughout Australia there are approximately 3,000 students in this system covering about 80% of the Northern Territory. Unfortunately this system is only open to children up until 7^th grade at which point they have several choices, they can either attend boarding school, move closer to a school and live with relatives, or stay at home and finish their degree through correspondence.

Even though this may not seem like a big attraction, I recommend visiting one of these schools to really see how the process works. It is very interesting to watch the instructor, who must be college certified, demonstrate their lesson and watch the other students reactions over the video screen. The School of the Air is a great solution to the problem of not having the money to fund many schools that would only educate a few people at each location.